St George Mining has swung into action again at Mt Alexander with development drilling on the Stricklands discovery now hitting high gear. An ‘around the clock’ drilling program over the deposit has been designed to quickly define an open pit resource for the discovery and produce metallurgical samples for the company’s scoping and mining studies.
St George Mining Executive Chairman, John Prineas said: “Mt Alexander is a hive of activity with both diamond and RC drilling progressing smoothly.”“The scoping study for a mining operation at Mt Alexander is also advancing with important milestones being delivered by the RC drilling and metallurgical holes at Stricklands.”
The Mt Alexander nickel project is located in the eastern Goldfields of Western Australia around 100 km west of Leonora. The project takes in a strategic holding over the under-explored Cathedrals Belt, with St George’s exploration program having led to the discovery of a plethora of new prospect areas, including Stricklands, Fairbridge, Radar and Fish Hook. These discoveries are strung out along more than 16 kilometres of strike with ongoing exploration aimed at ‘filling in the gaps’ and ‘lighting up’ additional nickel sulphide targets.
The company kicked off its latest exploration program a couple of weeks back and is already reaping the rewards of the intensive drilling program. Drilling over the Stricklands deposit is proceeding quickly whilst geophysics continues to light up targets along the entire Cathedrals Belt, with a spotlight being put on a range of impressive new targets below the existing discoveries.
The immediate focus of the current program is the Stricklands deposit at the western end of the Cathedrals Belt. Stricklands represents a potential open pit mining scenario given the shallow nature of the nickel sulphides at the prospect which St George believes could be rapidly bought into production to underpin the development of other discoveries at Mt Alexander.
The RC drilling at Stricklands is at present crunching away around the clock with an additional 505 metres of shallow diamond drilling for metallurgical test work scheduled for completion later this week.
To put extra weight behind the company’s scoping study, St George has engaged industry experts, Entech and XPS. Entech is scheduled to conduct a site visit this week, which will tick an essential box on the company’s road to a maiden resource for Stricklands.
Expert Processing Solutions, or “XPS” who are part of the multi-national Glencore group have also been brought in to supervise the metallurgical test work on the Stricklands diamond core and develop a flow sheet for the recovery of nickel, copper, copper and platinum group metals from the deposit.
Elsewhere at Mt Alexander, an extensive geophysical program is also nearing completion. The program of magneto-telluric, or “MT” surveying covers over 16 km of strike across the Cathedrals Belt and has identified large conductive targets below the Investigators, Fairbridge and Fish Hook prospects in addition to a new target down dip from Cathedrals. Diamond drilling will commence on these deeper MT targets once the rig finishes at Stricklands this week.
St George has received a welcome cash boost to fund the drilling of these deeper MT targets via the WA Government’s “Exploration Incentive Scheme” The money will co-fund the deep diamond drilling program at Mt Alexander to the tune of up to $150,000, allowing for a significant extension of St George's original program.
St George is delving into the Mt Alexander project with renewed enthusiasm and it continues to deliver quality targets for drill testing. The focus on Stricklands will deliver a maiden resource for the project in the coming months whilst the ongoing regional program continues to produce an enviable range of targets to add into the company’s project pipeline.
St George now appears focussed on making that difficult leap from explorer to producer and it shouldn’t need too many more new discoveries like those that it has already unearthed to make that strategy look real.
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By Matt Birney
